


Midnight

by tameila



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, F/M, Fae Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:14:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24444910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tameila/pseuds/tameila
Summary: Pike cannot remember how long she slept, undisturbed, unsummoned, alone.
Relationships: Scanlan Shorthalt/Pike Trickfoot
Comments: 12
Kudos: 34





	Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> It's the first Pikelan Day of 2020 and our theme this month was 'fey Pikelan'. I've had this idea ever since hearing "Midnight" by Radical Face for the first time, so it was a joy to finally bring it to life. Please enjoy! ✧

Pike cannot remember how long she slept, undisturbed, unsummoned, _alone_.

Half a millennium, maybe. She remembers, even as she is, cocooned in the bark of a wych elm, dressed in the undergrowth of the forest, half-asleep, the year no one ventured into The Bramble Woods. No tricks. No deals. No power to sustain. Apparently, there was a threshold to how many generations could fall prey to fey charms before people listened.

 _People will still come to me_ , she remembered saying to her cousin after that year, _They still need me_.

And, they did.

For a time.

A couple wayward souls a year. A baby swaddled in their mother’s arms. A soldier whose body left the field but their mind did not. Sickness. Madness. Desperation.

_As long as I can heal, they will still need me._

And, they did.

Before, medicine advanced and sicknesses found cures and madness subsided and the desperation that sent people to the fey faded from the world.

_They still need me._

When did she last speak those words? To whom? Most of her family had already faded back to the earth. She’d felt them go, felt a piece of the forest fade with them each time. For a fey with no deals is a dead fey, and a forest with no fey rots.

_Am I alone?_

The bark around her skin curls tighter.

_Why?_

The moon-washed grasses of the forest clearing draw further from view.

_I only wanted…_

Pike reaches up a shaky hand, weak fingers seeking purchase through the thinning crack in the bark.

_… to be…_

✧ ✧ ✧

Pike cannot remember how long she slept, undisturbed, unsummoned, _fading_ , before a haunting call wakes her from her slumber like a twig snapping underfoot. The bark unfolds from around her, like arms stretching up and up and up after a deep sleep, and Pike tumbles from the elm’s trunk on shaky legs.

As she collapses onto her knees in the grass of the clearing, her senses return to her in an exhausting rush. The grass is cool and damp with dew. A breeze whispers through the trees, catching in the knots of her hair and rippling goosebumps down her skin. It smells musty, like autumn, like rain-soaked leaves and dirt. Scents that cling to the back of her tongue. Her head spins, and —

There it is again.

On the wind, a soft melody, a dirge, a keen.

A summoning.

Pike pushes to her feet and makes her way through the trees on feet that know this path far better than her mind can recall. In the thicket, three steps away from visibility, she pauses to observe her patient. The call, though beautiful and clear as funeral bells, could be from a prankster or, worse, one with malicious intent.

It never hurt to be cautious.

Even now…

Even when all she wanted was to be…

It is a man. A gnome, actually, like her in a sense. A gnome far removed from the dirt-blooded, Fair-natured stock that birthed their race at The Beginning of Everything.

She can smell the rot in his veins.

Sickness, then, is his reason for calling.

The song — the summoning — her awakening cuts off abruptly as the man’s sickly thin frame shudders and twists with rib-cracking coughs. No good. Pike curls one hand around the bark that hides her, watching as he wavers on his feet, panting for breath, before he lifts his chin, chest still heaving, and his call warbles out once more.

“You needn’t!” Pike is half-way out in the clearing before she can finish her thought, hand outstretched towards the man. He stops mid-tune, mouth open, and eyes wide. With a roll of her shoulders, Pike tries again, calmer, “You needn’t continue. I’m already here.”

The man gives an awful croak, half-laugh, half-scream, before his lips snap shut.

Pike smiles. Her cheeks hurt from the exertion. It has been so many years since she asked them to do so much. “Do I frighten you, sir?”

“No,” the man looks her over and matches her tentative smile with a wide grin. “Quite the opposite.”

Pike snorts, a hand rushing to her face to hide the crack in her composure. She has no illusions about her appearance. She is a fey of the forest, after all. Bird’s nest hair. Skin like bark. Teeth that glint in the moonlight, sharp as bramble. Pupiless eyes. Yet, the man holds her gaze, smile unbroken. If anything, after her outburst, his smile has grown brighter. Hm. Her cousin told her that her eyes were blue once, pretty, like the sky that peeks through the canopy above.

Well...they had to bewitch their prey somehow.

“Flattery is not necessary, sir.”

“Call me Burt.”

It’s not his real name.

_So, even these days the townsfolk remember that rule._

“I cannot speak for everyone, but — Yes, my mother told me of the fair folk of the woods...and their tricks.”

Pike blinks. Oh. Had she spoken aloud?

Burt laughs. “I take it you don’t get many customers these days, huh?”

“Patients,” Pike corrects. “I call them patients.”

At that, Burt sobers and nods. “Right...I suppose that makes sense.” With his smile gone, the sickness in Burt’s veins becomes apparent once more. A heaviness sits on his brow. It weighs down the rest of his face and his eyes, brown like the dirt and as dark as rotting wood, lay deep in his skull. Sinking, like she was into her tree, back to the earth before…

It doesn’t matter.

She is needed now.

“Shall we make our deal, Burt?”

“Life for life, isn’t it?”

Pike nods. While her family had sustained themselves on trickery, offering knowledge or fortune in return for souls and trinkets, Pike offered the most important thing of all: Life. In return, one need only give up their livelihood. She took the strength of blacksmiths and the depth perception of archers. She took titles from nobles. Blissful ignorance from children. The latter had always been the hardest, but she’d supposed it was still infinitely better than the alternative...

“Take my voice.” Burt waves his hands away from his body, lifting his chin as if to offer his vocal cords. “I am a Bard, my dear fey. I make my living in taverns for meager change. I’ve marched with armies to raise morale. I’ve even been a noblewoman’s songbird, perched on the edge of finer society. Take this voice, and I will be destitute...”

“...but you will live,” Pike adds.

Burt nods but she could see the hesitation in his eyes. The quiet resignation to death by other means. She clicks her tongue and steps forward. One step then another, just to make sure he would not change his mind and flee. He does not. Pike reaches out and touches her fingertips to the soft curve of his throat. It trembles and wavers. His Adam's apple bobs. He does not flee. “You need not fear, young bard. You have charm enough in you that I am sure you will survive long beyond this time.”

Burt laughs. The vibration tingles on her skin and down her spine. “This is an odd time for flirting, but...Hey, I’m not complaining. You have the most beautiful eyes and a charm that comes from beyond the fey in your blood.”

Flushing, Pike pulls her hand back. “I only mean…,” she fumbles over a few consonants and fragmented phrases for blurting out, “Magic! You have magic. I can feel it in you….That’s...that’s all I meant.”

Again, Burt laughs and, for a moment, as she stares at the joy on his face, she almost forgets that he has come here on death’s door to make a deal for his life. There’s a liveliness to him. Untouchable by death. “Y’know, if I may make one final request before you —” and he mimes slicing his throat “ — take this pretty voice of mine…?”

Pike can only nod mutely.

“Will you talk with me for a while? Or, may I sing to you? If I only have this voice for one last night, I’d like to put it to good use.”

“Young bard…” The emotion that washes through her at the request is unexpected. Sadness. Joy. Acknowledgement. Pike cannot remember how long she slept, undisturbed, unsummoned, _alone_ in these woods before this gnome came to call. She doesn't know how long she will stay so once he leaves. “...I’d love that.”

✧ ✧ ✧

And so, they talk. Burt sings her folk songs and tells her stories of the world beyond the woods. His mother, the one who told him of her, passed long ago. It is why he came in the first place, even when the doctors told him there was no hope, because he could not let his mother’s sacrifices go to waste. He would live on somehow.

He would always find a somehow.

Pike tells him, tentatively at first, and then eagerly, of her life in the woods. She tells him about the days when she was called upon daily and when her family still populated the trees beside her. She’s alone in the clearing beyond the thicket now, but for now, sat on the cool forest floor with this gnome, she can remember how it was.

She can remember how it felt to be needed.

They talk until the first rays of sunlight creep across the undergrowth. Scanlan sings until the morning mist rises around his ankles, and his voice gives out. It is only then that Pike enacts their deal, binding him with vines to ease his instinctive struggle as her teeth sink deep into his neck. As her magic works, he fades from consciousness, and she draws out the blood that has turned on him with little to-do, but as she feels the first warm sips of magic — a Bard’s voice — she stills and takes only enough.

Just his singing voice.

Just a keepsake.

It may not be enough to sustain her for as long, but...at the very least, when she fades, she will remember him.

When the deal is finished, she carries him back to the forest edge, just within the treeline, as far as she’s allowed, and lays him on a bed of fallen leaves. With a brush of his hair from his cheek and a kiss upon his brow, she leaves him to find his way back home.

✧ ✧ ✧

A day’s walk North of Westruun, deep in the heart of the Bramble Woods, there is an archway, half-crumpled and covered in moss. That far into the forest no light can reach through the canopy, but the chipped stones glimmer as if touched by moonlight. You mustn't touch it, but you may pass through it. Be wary, though. For beyond that archway, the fair folk are tricky, as quick of mind as they are on foot.

Few come back without sealing a deal.

Even fewer see the mysterious fair folk that seal them.

They speak from the trees, from the shadows, through the mouth of a squirrel or the pages of a book. It’s part of their charm or curse, some say. In the same way you must never give a fey your name, the fey of the Bramble Woods must never show you their face.

That is the story, at least, that Scanlan Shorthalt tells — a song written by his hand but sung from other lips.

He gave his musical heart to the fey beyond the archway, you see.

“But, I’ll go back one day.”

The song travels through towns and taverns and palaces. People once more wonder about the fair folk that lurk in the forests and quiet hours of morning and out of the corners of their eyes.

People once more find need for a fey deal.

“After all, our deal is not yet complete.”


End file.
